As we told you about previously, Seagate seems to have had some issues with the 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11 series hard drive that has caused some uncharacteristic behavior when used in Macs or with the Linux OS in multi-drive configurations. Seagate has been able to isolate the issue and will be making an updated firmware available to users who are having these issues.

If you believe that you need the firmware update, Seagate is asking that you send an email to and include the model number, serial number, and current firmware revision of the drive which you should be able to get from the label on the top of the drive itself.

In addition, you should include in your email which OS you are running and what kind of specific problems you are seeing with the drive itself. Once Seagate gets your Email they will contact you with additional information and provide the new firmware to you and instruct you how to apply it to the drive.

It would be great if the story ended there, but it would seem that some who have applied the firmware update are already claiming that the new firmware decreases drive performance. If the updated firmware causes a performance hit, then it might not be the good news that owners of the drive were hoping to get from Seagate. Some users with the new firmware are claiming that if you disable the “write caching” on the drive, the performance of the drive will then increase.

We will continue to monitor the situation, but we suspect if the negative performance claims prove to be valid Seagate may, in fact, be working on a second firmware update to address the issue and get the performance issues resolved.